Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday February 06, 2012 @10:36AM
from the check-it-out dept.

First time accepted submitter tonique writes "Perl Data Language (PDL) 2.4.10 has been released. Highlights of the new release are automatic multi-thread support, support for data structures larger than 2 GB and POSIX threads support. Also available is the first draft of the new PDL book. PDL is especially suitable for scientists. For those not in the know, 'PDL gives standard Perl the ability to compactly store and speedily manipulate the large N-dimensional data arrays which are the bread and butter of scientific computing.' Commercial languages used for the same purpose include MATLAB and IDL."

Works great until you inherit code from some moron that used tabs in some places and 8 spaces in others (including alternating between lines right next to each other), then it makes your life hell sorting it all out. Matters get further complicated when your editor has a different setting of tabs than someone else on the same project.

Using tabs for whitespace in code is the work of an angry little daemon, but writing a language that is dependent on whitespace (and accepts tabs) when "proper" white spacing has been a religious war for decades prior to the birth of said language is the work of pure evil that makes Satan himself cringe.

I was happy to be reading/. on my lunch break and see PDL mentioned. I use PDL and am glad to see it get some notice.I am disappointment in the comments so far though. The anti-Perl froth is strong in this thread and I am not sure why?Here is my point of view:
-Use whatever programming language suits you and your task the best. Maximize for total productivity which is a function of both of these things in varying degrees.
-Perl suits me best, personally, as a comfortable tool This is kind of squishy...it just feels right to me. MANY MANY people agree with me. But maybe you don't. meh.
-My tasks involve (a) parsing data from a variety of sources and (b) number crunching. Perl is already fantastic at (a). PDL makes Perl fantastic at (b).
-The people behind PDL use it for even more numerically complex tasks than I. Check out the docs and mailing lost archives and see. http://pdl.perl.org/?page=mailing-lists
-If you are already writing code in C, Python, Fortran or whatever else than you should stick with it. Moving over to PDL just because it exists doesn't make any sense, of course.Now, as a Perl and PDL user could someone please explain to me the string visceral reaction shown by people in these comment threads whenever it is mentioned? Did Larry Wall challenge you to a bar fight once or something? (Probably not, I met him once and he doesn't seem like a bar fight kind of guy.)

It is more like: Some people lack the ability to write clean Perl code, and fear the clean code as it might make look the job too easy.

Perl is indiscriminate at making things easy, even if that is writing crappy code.

Unreadable Perl code isn't the problem of the language, it is the problem of the developers. Trying to fixing it at the language level is wrong and redundant, because in the end it would become Visual Basic or Java or Python. And we already have them.